The new U.A. Whitaker School of Engineering at Florida Gulf Coast University has been launched as a truly multidisciplinary engineering education endeavor with simultaneous development of three B.S. degree programs in bioengineering, environmental engineering and civil engineering. This interdisciplinary engineering curriculum includes eight common courses, one each semester, that all engineering majors will take. The third course in the sequence is a combined, four credit course of statics and dynamics, named Engineering Mechanics, taught in a combined lecture-lab format. This unique format provides five contact hours weekly, 2½ hours twice a week, for a total of 70 contact hours a semester. The extended meeting periods lend themselves particularly well to the lecture-lab format. There is time during each meeting period to allow students to "discover" engineering concepts in small groups using simple, and often, inexpensive physical models and measurement equipment. During each 2½ hour class at least one small group, hands-on activity is conducted. These activities include aspects of active and cooperative learning for learning problem solving techniques, with instruction and guidance from the instructor during the learning process. These activities are inexpensive and can be incorporated into a classroom of any size. Since this course is one of the eight interdisciplinary courses in the curriculum, efforts have been made to reduce the often heavy emphasis of civil and mechanical engineering in both the textbook and the typical class. Of the four authors, two are bioengineers who will be joining the faculty over the next year and co-teach this course. They have provided advice, assistance and sample problems focused in the biomedical area. These problems have been incorporated into class exercises, homework and exams. Student exam scores will be compared to similar exams from students in past years to assess whether this method improves student learning. Students will take a mini Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam in statics to assess their ability to solve statics problems. A future collaboration is planned with another university to have their students take the same exam so a comparison of the two teaching methods can be made. This paper and presentation will focus on providing examples of many of the in-class activities created and tested during the first offering of this course in the fall of 2006. Lists of needed equipment and supplies will be provided. Students showed a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and excitement for the hands-on activities. They commented on how it was so much easier to see and understand the problems.

In addition to student surveys, evaluation of student performance on both the final papers and final presentations occurred. Performance was measured against established rubrics that were presented to the students early in the semester and are shown in Tables 1 and 2. These rubrics were designed to include sections focusing on points discussed in the course throughout the semester-e.g. APA formatting, scholarly references, effective communication, the NAE Grand Challenges, etc. Students were encouraged to consult these rubrics starting as early as the outline stage, and continuing through draft and final submission preparation. Criteria Longer Description Points Overall Organization Has appropriate sections that flow logically, provide sufficient topic coverage, and are representative of current body of knowledge. Uses scientific language and structure throughout.

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In this work, a rapid prototyping approach for natural real-time interactions in virtual studio environments was used, in order to facilitate the creation of an interactive virtual robotic arm, that could be controlled by hand movements in a natural manner. The approach focuses on tracking a person and manipulating control parameters as a way of steering interactions. It has two main aspects. The first one is the authoring of spatial relationships between the person and the virtual environment. The second aspect is the use of gesture following to synchronize various animations or event sequences inside the virtual environment to the corresponding person's movements. Both aspects allow for a programming-by-demonstration approach and, combined, enable developers to rapidly create interactions by providing examples directly inside the blue or green box of the virtual studio.